Michael Regan, President Joe Biden’s freshly sworn in Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator, is seeking to clean up the mess left behind by the previous administration’s politically motivated attacks on science.
“When politics drives science rather than science informing policy, we are more likely to make policy choices that sacrifice the health of the most vulnerable among us,” Regan wrote in a letter to his staff obtained by NBC News.
“Manipulating, suppressing or otherwise impeding science” has “real world consequences for human health and the environment,” the administrator said.
He also promised that “retaliation, retribution, intimidation, bullying, or other reprisals” against staffers who raise any concerns to the EPA’s scientific integrity officials or the agency’s watchdog “will not be tolerated.”
Regan’s memo marks a full pivot from President Donald Trump’s rejection of climate science in favor of corporate-friendly policies that gutted the EPA’s crucial role in protecting the environment and combating climate change.
The previous administration made it their mission to slash EPA regulations, particularly those concerning pollution and gas emissions. Scientific researchers were routinely sidelined, and the Washington Post found that nearly 700 scientists at the EPA had left the agency by January 2020 after Trump took office. The administration even ordered the EPA to take down its page on climate change from its website.
Yes, the Republican war on science began in earnest with Gingrich, then intensified with Bush and Trump in the White House.
Mike Regan is not himself a scientist but, if his record as an administrator is any guide, I think he will do just fine.
Reportedly, a lot of data was removed from websites and servers, but staff members may have copied it off and squirreled it away to safety. Any word on if and when it can be restored?
Well, good. Long time no see, objective reality. We’ve missed you terribly.
I’d bet it’ll be trivially easy, mostly just relinking to pages still in the relevant folders, or going to the backup files. I doubt very much was actually erased.
This is one Regan I can support.
… was all part of the Republican war on reality itself. They have been working nonstop to replace facts and truth with self-serving spin. Trump put that program into overdrive with his accelerated attacks on the media as “enemy of the people” and to believe only what they heard from him. We’re at a point where Republican voters embrace total fantasy and conspiracy theories, and reject the evidence of their own eyes.
Science was just collateral damage.